Role Addresses and Their Effect on Email Deliverability

The data that follows was collected and analyzed by Victor Amin of SendGrid’s Big Data team and summarized by Jacob Hansen from the Delivery team.

When marketers are deciding what criteria they should use to measure the health or potential deliverability success of their email address list, we know that it is hard to narrow down that decision to just one or two indicators. Even a handful of known indicators would be nice. But, we see that there are numerous factors to consider at all times.

One main factor we have seen recently as a great indicator of list health is the presence of “role addresses.” They may indicate poor list acquisition practices or poor list management practices. Either way, one of our SendGrid data scientists, Victor Amin, was able to prove that they do have a negative impact on email delivery. His findings are shared below.

What Role Addresses Are

Role addresses are email addresses that typically define a responsibility rather than a person. Therefore, they are unlikely to give their consent to receive marketing emails. Role addresses can fall into a few subcategories:

• “Broadcast” addresses: Emails to these addresses go to many people at once.(examples: support@ or all@)
• “Position” addresses: These addresses might go to an individual, but the individual is not the owner of the address and the human recipient can likely change. (examples: admin@ or ceo@)
• “Service” addresses:  Service addresses are used as an interface to a program or service. Unwanted emails to them can actually incur a significant cost to the operator. For instance, this could be a service address that faxes anything emailed to it long distance. (examples: ftp@ and uucp@)
• “Test” addresses: These addresses are generally not published and are reserved for internal testing. (examples: test@ or asdf@)
• “Compliance” addresses: Compliance addresses are designed to identify bad senders. (examples: spam@ or abuse@)

Impact On Delivery and Reputation

Having role addresses on newsletter lists is considered a bad practice in general. But, there hasn’t been much data available to back up that claim. We recently developed an empirical method to find role addresses and review their effect on deliverability. We quantified the effects of role addresses on bounces, unsubscribes, spam reports, delivery, and engagement. What we found bolsters the claim that role addresses on a list have a negative effect: even a single role address on a newsletter list is associated with more bounces, more unsubscribes, and decreased delivery and engagement rates.

The plot below shows the median delivery rate (blue line), along with the 75th and 25th percentile delivery rates (light blue area) with respect to the number of role addresses. As suspected, a higher count of role addresses is correlated with lower delivery rates. And, while it may seem that the drop from 100% to 98% isn’t that drastic, remember that this is data pulled from 580,087 newsletters sent through SendGrid and 514,920,776 individual emails.

 

This additional graph below shows the results from when we reviewed the presence of role addresses within all email messages compared to their larger presence in “Bounce” and “Unsubscribe” groups.  We found that role addresses account for about 0.49% of all newsletter send requests. However, they account for 1.3% of unsubscribes and 1.6% of bounces (2.7x and 3.3x greater than the baseline send rate).

 

 

Creating Your Role Address List to Check Against

It’s often unclear what counts as a role address—different sources have different lists. And, no two role address lists are the same. Within SendGrid’s research method, we found 91 previously unreported role addresses. These were mostly foreign language role addresses. When combined with SendGrid’s current list, that gives us a comprehensive list of 251 role addresses. We recommend validating your own list against our new comprehensive list of role addresses listed below.

Remember that the presence of these role addresses are most likely an indicator of a larger list acquisition or list hygiene issue that is worth exploring deeper. But, it is definitely a good starting point.

SendGrid’s Full Role Address List:

123	contacto	geral	merchant	ripe-abuse
aaa	contactus	gerencia	myplex	root
abc	contato	gm	namecheap	rrhh
abuse	crew	head	news	rsvp
accounting	cs	head.office	no	sac
accounts	customercare	headoffice	no-reply	sale
adm	customerservice	headteacher	noc	sales
admin	customersupport	hello	noemail	school
administracion	custserv	help	noreply	schooloffice
administration	data	helpdesk	null	secretaria
administrativo	database	hi	office	secretary
administrator	design	hola	officeadmin	security
admisiones	dev	home	online	server
admissions	devnull	homes	operations	service
advisor	devops	hostmaster	ops	services
all	digsitesvalue	hr	order	shop
amministrazione	direccion	hr.dept	orders	shopping
arin	direction	human_resources	pastor	smile
arin-abuse	directo	ifttt	paypal	social
asd	director	info	per	socialmedia
asdasd	directors	information	phish	soporte
asdf	diretoria	informativo	phishing	spam
ask	dns	innkeeper	plex	staff
atendimento	domain	inoc	plex.tv	stay
available	download	investorrelations	post	studio
billing	editor	ispfeedback	postbox	subscribe
booking	editorial	ispsupport	postmaster	superintendent
bookings	editors	it	pr	suporte
broker	email	itsupport	president	support
bursar	engenharia	job	prime	survey
busdev	enq	jobs	principa	sysadmin
business	enquire	junk	privacy	systems
butik	enquiries	kontakt	purchase	team
care	envio	lifesum	purchasing	tech
careers	events	list	recepcion	techops
central	everyone	list-request	reception	test
ceo	exec	listmanager	recruit	theoffice
chartering	executive	listproc	recruiting	travel
church	executives	listserv	reg	undisclosed-recipients
co-op	expert	mail	registrar	unsubscribe
comercial	experts	mailbox	reklama	usenet
commerciale	export	maildaemon	remove	users
community	facebook	majordomo	request	uucp
compete	fbl	management	reserva	vendas
compliance	feedback	manager	reservas	ventas
compras	finance	marketing	reservation	web
consultant	financeiro	master	reservations	webmaster
contabilidad	frontdesk	md	response	welcome
contact	ftp	media	resumes	www
contact-us	general	memberservices	rh	zakaz

For more from Victor and the Big Data team, check out their recent study on email engagement and subject lines and for more delivery tips from Jacob, read his latest blog posts.